Theory of Remainders
by niccc
Summary: When you're marching to your death, your thoughts might become a little fractured and foreign.


What was he doing? What the bloody fuck in the name of all that is fucking holy was he doing? Had he ever behaved in such a manner? He didn't think he had done. This was a singular, one-off event. Well, he mused, naturally, as it could only result in his death, and he did not see himself sticking around this earth as a ghost. The permanence of that particular fate frightened him more than the permanence of actually being properly dead. There was something unnatural about being a shade, and he supposed that was why he was against it.

He'd always been one for order. He figured part of it was just in his nature, but he did not doubt that a lot of it stemmed from the fact that he had who he did for an older brother. The chaos that naturally followed in the wake of that boy, much to the chagrin of their parents, pretty much assured that the next one would not be nearly so boyish. No, he had never been allowed to be a child in the traditional sense the way his brother had been indulged. He supposed that part of it was his own doing. Most of it, maybe. He'd not spent a lot of time considering it, and so he could not give a more well thought-out rounded answer, and he thrived on well-thought positions. It did not do to exist so recklessly. It just wouldn't.

But _he_ had somehow made it work for him. It must have been the personality differences between the two boys. It was a bit funny, he thought, that for all his brother encouraged him to be less cautious, to be more like himself, to just let go, the less he felt obligated to do it, though sometimes he really wish he could. He wish he could just give in at times, but that also frightened him to death. How could one exist without order and structure? He just couldn't wrap his brain around such a life. But here he was, attempting to do just that: to just live. Ha. He was planning on trying to live by dying. If that wasn't a fucking contradiction, he really didn't know what was. How could that possibly work? And yet, he knew it was true, and it was right, and he knew it someplace other than in his mind, and, he thought, that he finally understood everything he was ever meant to, and that somehow made it all okay.

There was so much he'd never experience, never learn, never do, just nothing nothing nothing following this, and he thought he should have been more upset at this fact, because, logically, that would make sense. The deprivation of opportunity should have caused some fight in him, some unwillingness to accept this as his fate, but it didn't. The gut realisation that what he was doing was just so _right_ did more for him than 20 years thinking on it would have done, and he thought he finally understood how his brother was so sure that his way right, that their family, as a whole, had it all backward, thought he _finally_ understood his brother, which had always presented quite the complex puzzle to him, that he actually smiled at his accomplishment. He finally got it, and it wasn't through logic and deduction that it came to him, but in the sinking and undulating and utter upheaval his stomach was experiencing that cemented it in fact. How could such a visceral reaction be untrue? It simply couldn't be. At the end of the day, for all their progress, their technology, their being bipedal, humans were animals. They were prone to the same instincts, buried somewhere underneath that great cerebrum of theirs. Nearly forgotten, but never would it be gone completely. It just couldn't be. A species simply couldn't survive without some measure of instinct.

He found it funny that the instinct of self-preservation, which had been a constant in, and had served him so very well in the past, was entirely absent this evening. It was as though he was outside the situation completely - that it wasn't him standing on a wind-whipped rock, preparing to enter a hidden cave by the sea, and that it was merely someone that looked like him, someone who happened to have a house-elf like his, who was as loyal to him as his was. It simply couldn't be him. Because that wouldn't match up with what he'd proven himself to be in his short life. It was a doppelganger. A very good one, at that, but doppelgangers always have one flaw that distinguish them from the actual being they are imitating, and he supposed that the fact that he was willingly marching into death itself was the flaw in this one.

He'd been in a daze when he had cut his palm to garner entrance to the cave, and so much so that, though he knew the water OUGHT NOT BE TOUCHED, he nearly walked right into it. Well, that would have put a damper on the whole evening, he thought. And he laughed, his own lame joke amusing him. One should not laugh in times like this - it would cheapen what he was about to do, but how could he not help himself? He was about to _die_. The thought itself hilarious to him. And he laughed more to himself. More and more until it had become a high and steady and gasping and oh so manic what are you doing what are you doing WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!! That he couldn't stop. He couldn't stop, nor did he wish to. This was fitting. He'd never laughed so freely in his life, why shouldn't he do it right before he died? This night was proving to be one of firsts, after all.


End file.
